The Large Professor - Decisive Moments
By Phil Caravaggio
First published at www.johnberardi.com, Aug 20 2004.

For the last couple of weeks, while JB and our strength coach Ryan Foster were in Europe, I trained many of our clients here in Toronto. For the most part, it was a great experience. The people were fantastic, and it gave me a chance to break out of my normal carpal-tunnel routine.

Last Tuesday was my final day covering for Ryan. He had returned the night before, and he caught up with me in the gym office at the end of the day, eager to regale me with stories of his trip. He had just come back from a great vacation in France, having cycled all over the French countryside, through the Alps, into Paris. He had watched Lance Armstrong win his sixth Tour on the Champs-Elysee. He had seen and done so much, and met so many great people from around the world.

For my part, I had really been anticipating Ryan's return so that I could have my free time to myself again. I was eager to do other things. I wanted to write, work on my photography, and just do the other things that I enjoy and had been putting off. Moreover, I had just trained six clients in 7 hours, and I hadn't eaten anything but beef jerky, cashews and baby carrots since breakfast. I was hungry, tired, irritated, and really in no mood to chat. In short, I wanted to get the hell out of the gym.

So when he sat down and began to tell me about his experiences with French train conductors, I listened politely for five minutes or so. Then I politely interrupted, and politely excused myself.

Ryan took it all in stride. He’s the kind of person who will never make you feel guilty, even when he should. He just nodded. "No problem. Have a great night, then!"

I was already out the door.

"Thanks bro . . . we'll talk tomorrow," I said. The door shut before I finished that statement.

The next day, Wednesday, I left town, and I didn't return until Thursday evening. When I got back, I checked my answering machine. There were messages from all of our clients, all basically the same. "Just wondering where Ryan is . . . he didn't show for our session today. Let me know when we can reschedule."

Strange, because in six months Ryan had not even rescheduled a single session, let alone missed one outright.

I later found out that on Wednesday afternoon, Ryan had gone for a short ride on his bike here in town. He had just purchased it before he left for France, and had taken it with him so that he could ride some of the stages of the Tour. As he approached an intersection, a woman pulled a sharp left hand turn with her car right in front of him, thinking that she could beat him. She misjudged, and they collided head on. He was launched over his handlebars and directly into her car. He laid there, sprawled out on the pavement, unable to move. He was taken to a local hospital in an ambulance.

The impact caused by his body damaged the car so badly that it was nearly a write-off. The woman was charged with reckless driving.

Ryan survived, through some near-miracle. He came within an inch of death or paralysis. Though sore now, he will recover fully.

One brief instant, one decisive moment – sometimes that’s all it takes to decide the course of a life.

It's not the first time I've thought about this -- I've had more of those "instants" in my life than I care to remember. My sister's car accident two years ago, for example, when her car hit a telephone pole at roughly 60 km/hr. Or the time my mother called me from a hospital bed while I was away at college, telling me that the doctors suspected she had a blood clot in her lungs, and that shortly she could die. Or either of my father's two heart attacks.

We’ve all had them. In those instants, you wonder what you could have done differently. Maybe you could have done more. Maybe you could have driven your sister to work that day, or at least said goodbye to her before you left the house. Maybe you could have been kinder to your mother, or actually done those chores she asked you to do. Maybe you could have been less confrontational with your father, or taken some of his well-meaning advice to heart rather than dismissing it out of hand.

Maybe you could have invited your close friend, whom you hadn't seen for weeks, out for a beer to shoot the breeze about his trip instead of blowing him off. Maybe you could have listened to his story about the French train conductors.

And you wonder, about changing outcomes, about making amends, and about the next time. The next brief instant, the next decisive moment -- when will it be? And who or what will it involve? What, then, will you wish you had done differently? And when it does come, what if it's permanent? What if next time you can't make amends?

If you are even slightly self-aware, you take stock of your life. You think of all the wrongs that need to be made right, the things that need attention, things that will improve your life, things that will improve your relationships. Things you can do to preempt the devastating effects of those "instants," before they happen. You curse yourself for waiting this long, for not doing all of this sooner, for letting it get to this point. You curse yourself for needing a wakeup call to do the things you should have done just because.

And yet, wakeup calls serve a valuable purpose. You realize that the day to make things right is today, for tomorrow may never come. The day for change, for improvement – in short, for growth – is today.

There is a famous Italian poem the refrain of which is “Di doman, non c’è certezza.” Of tomorrow, there is no certainty.

Today is the decisive day; this moment, the decisive moment. What will you do with it?

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